Google's uptime beats ours: Mortgage Choice

Mortgage Choice chief information officer Neill Rose-Innes has said that the Google Apps cloud service is more reliable than its own infrastructure, despite this morning's minor glitch which saw users unable to access parts of the service.

"We did some analysis over a 12-month period and established that the uptime is in fact even higher with Google than with our own on premise solution," Rose-Innes told ZDNet Australia. "This was an expected outcome of a contracted service with Google and as a result it has been really good for us."

This morning's disruption to Google Docs was "not major", said Rose-Innes.

"Our operations team have access to a Google dashboard which indicates which services are functioning or not. Initially, there was an SLA to resolve the issue and/or provide feedback of 10:36am, which was extended to 11:36 this morning," said Rose-Innes. "The outage affects only some components of Google Docs, but not calendaring, email, sites or contacts."

"It would create more of a disruption if calendar, email and contacts were out. Interestingly, I am working in Docs right now," he said.

Mortgage Choice currently supports 90 internal group and state office staff, as well as 950 users via its 355 unit franchise network.

The company has relied on Google for six months as its primary document collaboration system; however, it has retained Microsoft Office on the desktop.

Unlike many Google Apps enterprise customers, Mortgage Choice opted for a direct relationship with Google. It was also the first customer to have made the switch from Lotus Notes.

"We assisted Google in developing a Lotus Domino tool. The tool takes an email, calendar entry or contact from Domino into the Google Apps world so that the user does not lose any of their information," he said.

"We managed our migration based on 20 users per day. This would enable our internal support resources to effectively support and guide up to 20 users per day if required. That's what we estimated we could manage at the outset of the project and proved to be a reasonable assumption," he explained.

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